Philippine ferry fire death toll reaches 35; 54 still missing

The ferry was seven kilometers off the coast of Palawan when the fire started Wednesday night, moving fast enough that passengers had no time to think. Arnulfo Nokki Villanueva was among those who felt the heat close in. He dropped to the deck as flames spread, his back seared by the fire. He wanted a life jacket—he reached for one—but other people were stepping on him in the crush, and he gave up. He jumped from a window instead. By Friday, when rescuers had recovered enough bodies to count, the death toll stood at thirty-five. Fifty-four people remained missing, their names still on a manifest that listed one hundred thirty-four souls aboard the MV June Aster when it left Manila bound for Coron.

The vessel itself was not large—fifty-three meters long, built to carry three hundred thirty-three passengers and crew combined. On this voyage it carried one hundred seventeen passengers and seventeen crew members. Two people listed on the manifest never boarded. The rest were trapped or lost in what came next. Rescuers on Thursday found the work nearly impossible. Heat and smoke poured from the hull, keeping them from entering the ship to search for anyone who might still be inside. The charred interior, when images finally emerged from the coast guard, showed what remained: human forms, ash, twisted metal, a car burned beyond recognition.

Lira Daco waited at a rescue center in the village of Turda, near where the ferry had been headed. Her daughter Cyriel was twenty years old and had been a passenger. Daco did not know which of the recovered remains, if any, belonged to her child. She spoke about what she could not see—her daughter calling for help while the fire consumed her. She said she would have accepted drowning, would have accepted the chance to recover a body and hold a funeral. But the fire had taken even that small mercy. She could not recognize what was left. She could not hold her daughter one last time.

Two survivors were tourists from Chile, recovering from burn injuries in a hospital in Coron. No other foreigners were reported to have been aboard. The ship's owner, Atienza Interisland Ferries Inc., confirmed this through a staff member. Coron itself is a destination people travel to see—clear water, limestone cliffs, rock formations that draw visitors from around the world. The ferry that caught fire was part of the ordinary machinery of life in the Philippines, where an archipelago of islands means ferries are how people move between home and work and family.

The cause of the fire had not been determined by the time the death toll reached thirty-five. Investigators would need to board the vessel, examine what remained, and piece together how the blaze began and why it spread so quickly that people on deck had seconds to choose between burning and jumping. The Philippines has a long history with maritime disaster. In 1987, the ferry Dona Paz collided with a fuel tanker and sank, killing more than four thousand three hundred people—still the deadliest peacetime maritime disaster in recorded history. Sea accidents in Philippine waters persist because of storms, because vessels are not always well maintained, because ships sometimes carry more people than they should, and because safety rules are not always enforced, especially in provinces far from the capital. The fire on the MV June Aster was the latest in a pattern that has claimed thousands of lives across decades.